Writing conceptual statements with 3rd graders

Among the 22 social studies benchmarks that third graders need to learn, third grade teachers meet the following three benchmarks by guiding their students through an inquiry into why ancient civilizations settled where they did. For this lesson, the teacher follows the simple inquiry cycle Invitation-Investigation-Demonstration.

• Economics Benchmark 3.2.4.5.1: Explain that producing any good or service requires resources; describe the resources needed to produce a specific good or service; explain why it is not possible to produce an unlimited amount of a good or service.

• Geography Benchmark 3.3.1.1.2: Create and interpret simple maps of places around the world, local to global; incorporate the "TODALS" map basics, as well as points, lines and colored areas to display spatial information.

• History Benchmark 3.4.3.7.1: Explain how the environment influenced the settlement of ancient peoples in three different regions of the world. (Early Civilizations and the Emergence of Pastoral Peoples: 8000 BCE—2000 BCE)

Invitation

To invite students to inquire into why ancient civilizations settled where they did, the teacher shows a world map, asking students what they see on the map. The discussion centers on the fact that this is a world map and that the ancient civilizations are concentrated in a particular place on the map (Europe-Africa-Asia).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/World_1_CE.PNG

Investigation

Then, the teacher shows the students a map that "zooms" in on this concentrated area. This "new" map shows something different. The teacher states that this map will give us information that we need to answer the question, "why did ancient civilizations settle where they did?"

http://www.rcet.org/twd/images/river_civilizations.jpg

Next, the students divide a piece of lined paper into thirds, horizontally. Students label the thirds with the words "See", "Think", and "Wonder". See-Think-Wonder is a Visible Thinking Routine from the book Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Morrison, and Church.

After students write down what they see on the map, they share with someone near them. Next, the students share out with the whole group and the teacher scribes the students' thinking, sorting as students share.

After, students label the categories.

Then, students are given a couple of quiet moments to write down what they are thinking about what the map is telling them, especially regarding where civilizations settled. Like before, they share with a small group before sharing in front of everyone. The teacher again scribes their thinking.

Demonstration

To demonstrate their conceptual understanding, the students are instructed to write down one sentence that sums up all the learning that they did about where ancient civilizations settled. Once everyone has had a chance to synthesize their own thinking, everyone shares their thinking, starting with a simple statement and then revising it until the statement is timeless, abstract (to a degree), universal, and transferrable. In the example below, the quotations between the drafts are the teacher's prompts. The changes on the drafts reflect the suggestion from the 3rd grade students.

"Why did ancient civilizations settle where they did?"

"What else to we want to include? What is missing?"

"What do we mean by 'everything they needed'?"

"I'm a little confused who is doing all of this and what they're doing. Our subject needs a subject and a verb."

"Was it just Egyptians that did this?"

"I'm going to read a page from the text Understanding Civilizations by Stefan Stevens. In the book, the author wrote a page that explains why ancient civilizations settled where they did. Let's check to see if we're missing anything."

http://cdn2.lybrary.com/understanding_civilizations_by_stefan_stevens_1477726225.jpg

"You know a band of the Dakotah-Sioux Indians settled on the banks of the Mississippi River near our school for a lot of these same reasons, but they only settled there several hundreds years ago. Also, the South St. Paul stockyards were started here in 1886 because of the river. How can we change our statement to include these more recent events?"

After reading about how third grade teachers have written a conceptual statement with their students, how have you or could you write generalizations with your students?

Writing conceptual statements with students

In a Primary Years Program, we must find a balance between “acquisition of essential knowledge and skills, development of conceptual understanding, demonstration of positive attitudes, and taking of responsible action,” (Making the PYP Happen, p. 10).

Learning specific factual content and skills is important, however educators must also identify the timeless, abstract, universal, and transferable concepts they want their students to learn. “The factual knowledge is what students must know in order to describe, discuss, explain, or analyze the deeper concepts. One cannot understand the conceptual level without the supporting factual knowledge. But there must be a synergy (emphasis added) between the two levels if we are to systematically develop intelligence,” (H. Lynn Erickson, p. 3, Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom, 2007, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press).

As students work within the synergy between specific knowledge and universal concepts, they should make their thinking visible by synthesizing their learning into a conceptual statement. Erickson, calls these statements generalizations: “Two or more concepts stated in a relationship that meet these criteria: generally universal application, generally timeless, abstract (to different degrees), supported by different examples (situational). Enduring, essential understandings for a discipline,” (Erickson, 2007, p. 31).

Not long ago, I was working with fifth-grade students on the concepts of decisions, choices, and impacts by studying specific decisions Nelson Mandela made in his life and the impacts they had on his life, his country, and the world. (To get a more complete idea of what I did in that lesson, see my last blog post on Flow Maps.) Once students had read about, described, discussed, explained, and analyzed Mandela’s decisions and their impacts, I wrote the words, “Decisions, Choices, Impacts” on the board and asked the students, “based on what we learned today about Nelson Mandela, his decisions, and their impacts, what can we say that we learned about decisions, choices, and impacts in general?” I told the students that the first idea didn't have to be perfect, but we just needed to put something up so we could start to work with it.

The first student volunteered the following statement:

Next, a student tried to offer a completely different statement and I encouraged her to make edits to the one we already had, instead of completely starting over. Another student suggested the following edit:

When I asked her to explain her thinking (in order to make it visible!), she said, "because you could do something bad and it will also impact your life."

Then, another student mentioned the following edit:

I asked her to explain her thinking and she said that our decisions have impacts right away and when you grow up (we had discussed short- and long-term impacts during the lesson). So, we shouldn't just say, "when you grow up." I asked her if there was anything we could add instead, to communicate that decisions have impacts in both the short- and long-term, so she proposed the following addition:

After that, a student said he wanted to make the following revision:

When I asked him to explain his thinking, he said, "We can do lots of things - like pick something up (as he mimed picking up an object) - that don't impact our lives. But we talked about what happens when we make a decision."

At this point in the lesson, students weren't volunteering any more edits or revisions to the statement, so I read it aloud to them: "If you make a decision it can have an impact on your life in the future." Then, I told them we had to "test" our statement to make sure it was conceptual:

"Does this statement apply to Nelson Mandela?"

YES! the students responded.

"Could this statement apply to us?"

YES! the students responded.

"Ok, if this statement applies to us here in Minnesota, would it apply to a student in France?" 

YES! the students responded.

"If it applies to us here in 2014, would it apply to a 10-year-old in 1914?"

YES! The student responded.

Although I knew that our statement met the criteria for a generalization as outlined by Erickson, I had one more change I wanted to make. I told the students that since our statement applied to everyone, I thought we should change the pronouns "you" and "your" to "we" and "our". They consented and we were left with our final version:

Note: ordinarily, when crafting conceptual statements, generalizations, central ideas and lines of inquiry, it is advised to avoid pronouns. However, in the moment, working with the fifth graders, I felt using pronouns in our conceptual statement was appropriate to keep our statement directly relevant to the lives of the students.

After reading about how fifth graders wrote a conceptual statement based on the synergistic learning they had done, how could you or have you written conceptual statements with your students to synthesize their learning?